Up, Up, & Away With 3 Storeys!

PS: this is the real estate agent’s blurb that accompanied the 6 Larman St, East Bentleigh advertising –

Play with the Possibilities (general residential zone)

Fit the family, invite the in-laws, develop the dream! With a charming three bedroom, two bathroom brick home, around 643sqm of land and flexible General Residential Zoning, this versatile property in the Gardeners Reserve/Moorabbin Hospital precinct has so many possibilities to play with!

Offering three living areas, two quality kitchens, two-car garaging and scope to configure as two dwellings, this immaculately presented home offers excellent family accommodation for today, exceptional rental potential for tomorrow and all the extras you could need (including gas and woodfire heating, air-con’r, polished boards and robes) as a basis for renovation and extension in the future.

Alternatively, see the future rewards in this super-central site and explore the multi-level, multi-home potential offered by flexible zoning (subject to Council Approval). Close to the Glen Eira Sports and Aquatic Centre, medical facilities and Centre Rd shopping and transport, this prime site is ready to get into the game!

Council studiously avoided specifying what they wanted for each Housing Diversity [sic] area, other than to say it should be a “mix of single dwellings, two dwelling developments and other forms of multi-unit development” and muttered something woofly about ensuring “the density, mass and scale of residential development is appropriate to the location, role and neighbourhood character of the specific housing diversity area”. It used to have a discretionary height limit of 9m and now has a mandatory height limit of 10.5m.

found a sales contract between developer and someone with an address in Beijing. Seeing it in black and white is quite alarming. I know it is legal for new properties but this is so stupid. This is not real investment in the country!. Take this away and watch how quickly these developments stop!. Also laugh at governments who are spending billions keeping out 2000 poor asylum seekers whilst encouraging 250,000 legal immigrants a year that are driving development and taking Australian jobs. But that is racist saying that!

Another three adjacent properties up for sale by the one real estate agent near the Cnr. of East Boundary and Centre Road.

Just another example of the impact of the zones – Council’s slanted marketing of the zones was the introduction of certainty on height limits. Just over 12 months on residents are realising that that certainty is for developers rather than themselves because the height limits mean that while developers can go for the max, residents rights to object on the basis of height (and hence overshadowing and overlooking, neighbourhood character) have been removed.

Add this to Council’s continual failure to address the issues that arise for such development (ie. traffic congestion, parking management, surface run off, public safety, open space (parkland), tree protection and sustainability) and it means residents have more faith in real estate agents and developers than it does with Council.

“Subject To Council Approval” [STCA] is another highly misleading phrase. The defacto metropolitan planning authority in Victoria is VCAT, and development is subject to VCAT approval. Council’s job is to reduce the workload on VCAT by guessing what the VCAT decision would be regardless of the merits, or at least that is the view Cr Lipshutz has expressed in Council in support of most development.

That is why we see inadequate setbacks on Hawthorn Rd, why 5-storey developments are being erected and extended in NRZ/Minimal Change, why nobody living in a Housing Diversity area is entitled to protection of their amenity, why solar access is considered a luxury not a requirement, why development exceeds the pace at which government is prepared to invest in supporting infrastructure, why people are being pushed into areas of higher density without safe or convenient access to open space. All at a time when Victoria’s fertility rate is less than that needed to maintain a stable population.